With limited arable land coupled with rising demand of a steadily increasing human population that could reach 9 billion by 2050, food supply is a global challenge making production of economically attractive and high quality food, free from unacceptable levels of agrochemicals, a dire need.
Traditional plant breeding strategies to enhance plant traits are relatively slow and inefficient. For example, breeding plants for increased tolerance to abiotic stress requires abiotic stress-tolerant founder lines for crossing with other germplasm to develop new abiotic stress-resistant lines. Limited germplasm resources for such founder lines and incompatibility in crosses between distantly related plant species represent significant problems encountered in conventional breeding. Breeding for stress tolerance has often been inadequate given the incidence of stresses and the impact that stresses have on crop yields in most environments of the world.